Tuning Stereo, Internal Light, Clock Not working, Fuse 15 keeps blowing?

[allgood]

Hi guys,

As the title suggests this problem started happening last night. I realised the stereo and the internal light was not working and the clock was being weird. The car is a Seicento Y reg and everything else seems to be ok.

After trying to replace fuse 15 with another one (or 5!) they all kept blowing. After checking the connection my Dad found a dead short to earth. We took all of the devices off that use that fuse such as the light, stereo, instrument pod and it is still showing a dead short.

My Dad reckons there is a wire that could be pinched/cut somewhere behind the dash as the stereo leads are showing no positive feed. If anyone could step in and tell us what we should be looking for we would be grateful.

Thanks,

Michael

 

[arc]

Sometimes the stereo feed can get trapped by the frame/cage when installing the stereo.

You sound like you're on the right track, just keep poking things till you find the short!

 

[allgood]

To anybody wondering. After a lot of poking, prodding, pulling and frustration we didn't find the cause of the short. It is definitely in the wiring but as we didn't take the dash off we couldn't properly get to it. We decided to rewire the devices attached to that fuse. I thought I'd post here incase anyone wanted to do this or repair the same problem.

For the interior light - Red/Green wire is dead short.
For the stereo - Red/Green wire is dead short.
For the OBD2 port - Red/Green is dead short.

It then took us ages to find the clock wire as the Technical manual which was extremely useful for the others only covered the SPI cars. On an MPI, if you take out the red and blue plugs on the back of the Cluster you will find the red connector has two more connectors inside. A blue and a black. All of the blue connections take reading from the ECU to run the checks such as Oil, Battery etc. The black plug controls power.

The live positive feed that runs the clock when the ignition is off is colour RED/ORANGE, and guess what? Dead short too!

We ran 4 new wires to each device, then attached an inline fuse holder with a 15Amp fuse and finally tapped into the live positive wire on the back of the fuse box. Everything works as it is now

Michael

 

[Lukas Fluff]

I found this thread while suffering constant blowing of fuse 1 on my 899 Cinq earlier this week, a couple of weeks after wiring a second head unit into the rear of the cabin (yes, sounds pointless but one day I'll post pics, and it's switched so only one can be used at once).
The fuse blew after hitting a pothole, so after checking *almost* all of the accessible connections under the dash, I was pondering a weekend pulling the dash and testing wires outdoors in low-single-figure temps.

After checking connections again and a last ditch wiggle & swap of the horn & hazard relays (which I realise was probably never going to solve the problem), I discovered that the one connection I'd missed, into a non-OEM cigarette lighter, had been shorting, and once fully disconnected, the problem was solved.

N.B. It was left disconnected as there's a little extension loom I now want to make in order to connect a second, USB-only power outlet in the centre console, because I don't like driving/charging with the ashtray open .

I'm guessing that as the coil in the cig lighter will pull a lot of current to sufficiently heat up, and that this particular circuit is normally open until you need a smoke, there's plenty of unwanted excess current should the circuit be accidentally closed without the coil in the loop.

Thanks,
Lukas